I wish I’d gotten a chance to rebut Mr. Strand’s last comments about gun violence in America. He said he doesn’t believe it’s going down, but that’s not really something in which belief is optional. It’s fact. It may be devastating for the case anti-gun people make for gun control, but the simple fact is that even as gun ownership has proliferated in America gun crime has gone down according to the FBI’s national statistics and has been trending down for decades:

I won’t go so far as to say that more guns in society means less crime (though I certainly believe in advantages of a society that takes self defense seriously), but clearly the correlation between guns and more/deadlier crime doesn’t actually exist.

I also wasn’t fond of the way Strand talked about the oil boom, as if it were an invasion of these foreign cretins here to wreck our state. That is patently unfair. Yes, North Dakota is changing and not always for the good, but the people coming here are human beings looking to work and provide for themselves and their loved ones.

Rob Port is the editor of SayAnythingBlog.com. In 2011 he was a finalist for the Watch Dog of the Year from the Sam Adams Alliance and winner of the Americans For Prosperity Award for Online Excellence. In 2013 the Washington Post named SAB one of the nation's top state-based political blogs, and named Rob one of the state's best political reporters.